Christian Classics Ethereal Library

Interesting post today from The Writer's Almanac (you can find Paradise Lost on ccel.org):

Today is the birthday of English poet, pamphleteer, and historian John Milton (1608). When he was blind, impoverished, and living in seclusion in the countryside, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, considered the finest epic poem in English.

Milton was born in Bread Street in London to a solidly middle-class family. His father was a scrivener and composer of church music who doted on his son, providing him with a private tutor. Milton was smart, precocious, and dedicated. He wrote his first psalms at 15. His brother recalled, “When he was young, he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o’clock at night.”

After attending Christ’s College in Cambridge, where he was notorious for his temper and good looks, he underwent six years of intensive independent study, reading literature, mathematics, and languages, eventually teaching himself French, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, and Greek. He did a “continental tour” of Europe (1638) and even met the astronomer Galileo, who was then under house arrest.

The first edition of Paradise Lost comprised 10 books of over 10,000 lines of verse. Book IX is the longest, with 1,189 lines; Book VII is the shortest, with only 640 lines.

Milton was 60 years old when it was published in 1667. During the poem’s composition he suffered, gout, depression, and the death of his second wife and infant daughter. Paradise Lost has influenced countless artists and writers, from Salvador Dali to William Blake to Mary Shelley, who was inspired to write Frankenstein after reading Paradise Lost.

Happy birthday to St. Augustine, born this day in 354 AD.

Author info: St. Augustine - Christian Classics Ethereal Library Accepted by most scholars to be the most important figure in the ancient Western church, St. Augustine was born in Tagaste, Numidia in North Africa. His mother was a Christian, but his father remained a pagan until late in life. After a rather unremarkable childhood, marred only by a case of stealin...

More interesting info from the Writer's Almanac:

On this day in 1452, the first section of the Gutenberg Bible was finished in Mainz, Germany, by the printer Johannes Gutenberg. Little is known of Gutenberg's early history or his personal life except that he was born around the year 1400, the youngest son of a wealthy merchant, but from the time of the appearance of his beautiful Bibles he has left an indelible mark on human culture.

Ancient books had primarily been written on scrolls, though an innovation in the second century A.D. — that of the codex, a sheaf of pages bound at one edge — gave us the familiar book form we recognize today. Early codices were produced by hand by monks in scriptoriums, working with pen and ink, copying manuscripts one page at a time so that even a small book would take months to complete and a book the size of the Bible, rich with color and illuminations, would take years.

Gutenberg's genius was to separate each element of the beautiful, calligraphic blackletter script commonly used by the scribes into its most basic components — lower case and capital letters, punctuation, and the connected ligatures that were standard in Medieval calligraphy — nearly 300 different shapes that were then each cast in quantity and assembled to form words, lines, and full pages of text.

He also invented a printing press to use his type, researching and refining his equipment and processes over the course of several years. In 1440, Gutenberg wrote and printed copies of his own mysteriously titled book, Kunst und Aventur [Art and Enterprise], releasing his printing ideas to the public. And by 1450, his movable-type printing press was certainly in operation.

It is unclear when Gutenberg conceived of his Bible project, though he was clearly in production by 1452. He probably produced about 180 copies — 145 that were printed on handmade paper imported from Italy and the remainder on more luxurious and expensive vellum. Once complete, the Bibles were sold as folded sheets, the owners responsible for having them bound and decorated, so that each surviving copy has its own unique features like illumination, dashes of color, marks of ownership, and notes and marginalia.

Only four dozen Gutenberg Bibles remain, and of these only 21 are complete, but what Gutenberg created went far beyond the reach of those volumes. By beginning the European printing revolution, he forever changed how knowledge was spread, democratized learning, and allowed for thoughts and ideas to be widely disseminated throughout the known world. In his time, Gutenberg's contemporaries called this "the art of multiplying books," and it was a major catalyst for the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and even the Protestant Reformation. In 1997, Time magazine named Johannes Gutenberg "Man of the Millennium" and dubbed his movable type as the most important invention of a thousand years. His name is commemorated by Project Gutenberg, a group of volunteers working to digitize and archive cultural and literary works, while making them open and free to the public. His name was even placed in the skies as the planetoid Gutemberga.

Mark Twain wrote in 1900, in a congratulatory letter to mark the opening of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz: "What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage ... for the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favored."